Pradosh Mohapatra started the Typical SD-WAN Solution Architecture section of Software-Defined WAN (SD-WAN) Overview webinar with the backend architecture.

Next step: CPE architecture, the topic of today’s video.

Daniel left an interesting comment on my Studying EVPN to Prepare for a Job Interview blog post:

I also never build a VXLAN fabric with two vendors. So, is it possible now to build one large fabric consisting of multiple vendors?

TL&DR: Yes, but just because you could doesn’t mean that you should.

While I was developing Network Automation Concepts webinar and the network automation online course, I wrote numerous blog posts on the Network Infrastructure as Code (NIaC) concepts, challenges, implementation details, tools, and sample solutions.

In March 2023 I collected these blog posts into a dedicated NIaC resources page that also includes links to webinars, sample network automation solutions, and relevant GitHub repositories.

One of my readers sent me this question:

In your observations on IPv6 assignments, what are common point-to-point IPv6 interfaces on routers? I know it always depends, but I’m hearing /64, /112, /126 and these opinions are causing some passionate debate.

(Checks the calendar) It’s 2023, IPv6 RFC has been published almost 25 years ago, and there are still people debating this stuff and confusing those who want to deploy IPv6? No wonder we’re not getting it deployed in enterprise networks ;)

I already mentioned the introduction of VRF- and VLAN access links in netlab release 1.5.1. Let’s see how they can simplify your lab topologies.

I always tried to make lab topologies as concise as I could, sometimes cheating using JSON-in-YAML syntax. For example, the topology describing three routers running OSPF could be as simple as this:

module: [ ospf ]
nodes: [ r1, r2, r3 ]
links: [ r1-r2, r2-r3, r3-r1 ]

Let’s unravel that:

People keep telling me how well large language models like ChatGPT work for them, so now and then, I give it another try, most often resulting in another disappointment¹. It might be that I suck at writing prompts², or it could be that I have a knack for looking in the wrong places³.

This time⁴ I tried to “figure out⁵” why we need iSCSI checksums if we have iSCSI running over Ethernet which already has checksums. Enjoy the (ChatGPT) circular arguments and hallucinations with plenty of platitudes and no clear answer.

Bruce Davie continues documenting the tradeoffs we had to make in networking, this time with Was MPLS Traffic Engineering Worthwhile? I found this bit particularly familiar:

It wasn’t hard to make a theoretical argument that MPLS-TE could improve network performance and average link utilization, by moving traffic from congested links to uncongested ones. The hard part was proving that it would actually do a better job in practice than the more traditional methods such as using link weights and multipath routing to achieve the same ends.

After introducing netlab in the Network Automation Tools webinar, I spent a few minutes describing the structure of the netlab lab topology file.

As always, use the video only as a starting point. For more details, read the netlab documentation (overview, reference guide).

I must be a good prompt engineer – every time I ask ChatGPT something really simple it spews out nonsense. This time I asked it to build a small network with four routers:

I have a network with four Cisco routers (A,B,C,D). They are connected as follow: A-B, B-C, A-D, D-C. Each router has a loopback interface. Create router configurations that will result in A being able to reach loopback interfaces of all other routers.

Here’s what I got back¹:

Here’s an example configuration for the four routers that should allow Router A to reach the loopback interfaces of all other routers:

One of my subscribers sent me this question:

I’m being asked to enter a working group on RPKI and route origination. I’m doing research, listening to Jeff Tantsura, who seems optimistic about taking steps to improve BGP security vs Geoff Huston, who isn’t as optimistic. Should I recommend to the group that the application security is the better investment?

You need both. RPKI is slowly becoming the baseline of global routing hygiene (like washing hands, only virtual, and done once every blue moon when you get new IP address space or when the certificates expire). More and more Internet Service Providers (including many tier-1 providers) filter RPKI invalids thus preventing the worst cases of unintentional route leaks.

Previous posts in this series (DHCP relaying principles, inter-VRFs relaying, relaying in VXLAN segments and relaying from EVPN VRF) used a single DHCP server. It’s time to add another layer of complexity: redundant DHCP servers.

Lab Topology

We’ll use a lab topology similar to the VXLAN DHCP relaying lab, add a second DHCP server, and a third switch connecting the two DHCP servers to the rest of the network.

The “beauty” (from an attacker perspective) of the original shared-media Ethernet was the ability to see all traffic sent to other hosts. While it’s trivial to steal someone else’s IPv4 address, the ability to see their traffic allowed you to hijack their TCP sessions without the victim being any wiser (apart from the obvious session timeout). Really smart attackers could go a step further, insert themselves into the forwarding path, and inject extra payload into unencrypted sessions.

A recently-discovered WiFi vulnerability brought us back to that wonderful world.

A friend sent me a video demo of his AI-driven network device configuration proof-of-concept. Before commenting on that idea, I wanted to see how well AI works as an assistant. Once Kristian Larsson mentioned he was using GitHub Copilot, it was obvious what to do next: try it out while working on the next netlab release.

TL&DR:

• It works.
• Some Copilot suggestions are uncannily accurate; others are fishing expeditions.
• It’s bland.

Years ago I loved ranting about the stupidities of building stretched VLANs to run high-availability network services clusters with two nodes (be it firewalls, load balancers, or data center switches with centralized control plane) across multiple sites.

I collected pointers to those blog posts and other ipSpace.net HA cluster resources on the new High Availability Service Clusters page.

netlab release 1.5.1 makes it easier to create topologies with lots of VRF- or VLAN access links, or topologies with numerous similar links. It also includes support for D2 diagram scripting language in case you prefer its diagrams over those generated by Graphviz.

Even if you don’t find those features interesting (more about them later), you might want to upgrade to fix a nasty container-related behavior I discovered in recently-upgraded Ubuntu servers.